Like many Black women across the South, I come from a family of care workers. Nearly every woman on my mothers side of the family my mother, aunts, grandmother, and great grandmother cared for white families in the segregated Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Their stories are the story of the American economy: built on the backs of Black women who were undervalued, underprotected, and, for centuries, underpaid. For generations, the economy has left behind the care workforce and families who need care but can’t afford it. And children whose education depends on the zip code they were born in.
WHYY
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A SEPTA bus approaches City Hall in a bus lane.(Kimberly Paynter/WHYY)
Philadelphia made headlines for passing a slate of worker protections laws between 2015 and 2021. The Office of Worker Protections oversees the enforcement of such laws, intended to give workers a heads up about their schedules, keep sick people from working, ensure domestic workers have paid time off, and to protect workers who speak up about COVID-19 conditions, among many other protections.
But, the office is too strapped to do its job, said city councilmembers and workers’ rights groups who are demanding more funding. The current staffing level allows employers to violate the laws with impunity, and cases to languish, according to low-wage workers who have had contact with the office.
Women of Color Coalition endorses Jennifer McClellan for governor
Published Tuesday, Apr. 27, 2021, 3:29 pm
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Jennifer McClellan
Jennifer McClellan received the first official endorsement of the Women of Color Coalition, a national grassroots organizing group led by women of color first formed for the Biden-Harris 2020 campaign.
The coalition has about half a million members pledged to make phone calls, send text messages, write postcards, and knock on doors to make McClellan the first woman governor of Virginia and the first Black woman governor in U.S. history.
John Sweeney and Worker Centers prospect.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from prospect.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The Alt-Labor Chronicles: Americaâs Worker Centers
The Alt-Labor Chronicles: Americaâs Worker Centers
A Prospect series on how day laborers, domestics, fry cooks, and others have built institutions and won power to better their lives
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Worker centers sprang up independently, sometimes not even knowing that kindred groups of workers in other cities had established similar centers.
This is the introduction to our series The Alt-Labor Chronicles: Americaâs Worker Centers.
In the American economy, millions of workers fall through the cracks. Sometimes thatâs the clear intent of public policy. When Congress enacted the landmark New Deal legislation that gave workers collective-bargaining rights and established a federal minimum wage, they excluded farmworkers and domestic workers. President Roosevelt and the billâs authors needed the votes of Southern senators and congressmen to turn the bills into law, and since farm and domestic workers in the South w